Add This

Tuesday, 4 June 2013

This is my first post from my iPad. It is hard even for me to believe considering how much I adore my iPad. The problem is that I only just discovered the free,blogger app. This is quite remiss on my part considering it was released in November 2012. To be fair, I had looked for it last summer, only to find there wasn't one. It was disappointing, but life went on and I kept blogging on my Mac. A few weeks back I searched for it again, and there it was. I was skeptical at first, as my experiences with Google Drive have been less than ideal. I doubted that it would be a game changer. I was wrong!

I love it. While it is not perfect in my opinion, this simple app is very friendly. I really like that allows users to switch between blogs with a tap. That is something we have come to expect from Google accounts.

When Looking ahead at the new school year, I can see how we are going to use this. Our 5th grade students are coming up to secondary with their own blogs in August. They are bloggers and we want to encourage them to keep it up and extend their blogging to include other areas of focus. This app is going to facilitate the to work we will do with them involving sharing, reflection and digital portfolios.

Jen's Wishlist for the Blogger App:

Link and embed options would be fab!

Lessons learned:

-Google Apps for iPad are evolving in a good way.

-Don't give up! Always check back for Apps you want that don't exist. If you are patient, someone will invent them. If you know your stuff, it could even be you.

Flipboard

My other new love is Flipboard. It isn't new really. It has been around since December of 2010. I downloaded it sometime last year after reading about and then proceeded to get busy and forget to play with it. A few weeks back I was getting frustrated in trying to keep track of all my feeds.There were too many. It was unmanageable. I was missing out on so much!

I solved the problem. The school had just lent me a Samsung Galaxy S3 and I added the Flipboard widget. It is fantastic! I brings everything together in one place as a digital magazine. it is oranised by the feeds of your choice, flips beautifully through them and is easy to share from to your different social networks.

As I was sat at the breakfast table this morning, during the traditional wait for my kids to get ready, I didn't go to Twitter or Facebook, instead I opened Flipboard on my iPad. Yes the app was still there! (I am an App hoarder!) It is hard to describe how much I enjoyed the experience of flipping through articles from my chosen feeds. I was reading a magazine, for which I had chosen the content, based on my interests.

It struck me how lovely and effortless it was to bring so much of what I am interested in into one place. Not since I discovered Google Reader so many years ago have I had this experience and trust me, this is so much better. If you miss Google Reader, get over it and get Flipboard